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Are you ready for the modern-day compendium on the state of hardware-accelerated transcoding performance and video quality? We decided to take an in-depth look after a few bad experiences, and you'll be surprised at how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

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I signed up just to agree with this. I've been reading this site for over 5 years and I have hoped and hoped that this site would change to accommodate the user, but, clearly, that's not going to happen. Not to mention all the spelling and grammar mistakes in the recent year. (Don't know about this article, didn't read it all).

I didn't even finish reading the article and looking at the comparisons because of the problem sploiled1 mentioned. I don't want to click on a single image 4 times to see it fullsize, and I certainly don't want to do it 4 times (mind you, you'd have to open the article 4 separate times) in order to compare the images side by side (alt-tab, etc).

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I would say not long from here we'll see encoders doing video parallel encoding by loading pieces between keyframes. keyframes are tiny jpegs inserted in a movie preferably when a scenery change happens that is greater than what a motion codec would be able to morph the existing screen into.
The data between keyframes can easily be encoded in a parallel pipeline or thread of a cpu or gpu.
Even on mobile platforms integrated graphics have more than 4 shader units, so I suspect even on mobile graphics cards you could run as much as 8 or more threads on encoding (depending on the gpu, between 400 and 800 Mhz), that would be equal to encoding a single thread video at the speed of a cpu encoding with speed of 1,6-6,4GHz, not to mention the laptop or mobile device still has at least one extra thread on the CPU to run the program, and operating system, as well as arrange the threads and be responsible for the reading and writing of data, while the other thread(s) of a CPU could help out the gpu in encoding video.

The only issue here would be B-frames, but for fast encoding video you could give up 5-15MB video on a 700MB file due to no B-frame support, if it could save you time by processing threads in parallel.

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first thanks for the article i been looking for this, but your gallery really sucks, i mean it takes me good 5 mins just to get 3 pics next to each other to compare , the gallery should be updated to something else for fast viewing.

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[citation][nom]spoiled1[/nom]Tom, You have been around for over a decade, and you still haven't figured out the basics of web interfaces.When I want to open an image in a new tab using Ctrl+Click, that's what I want to do, I do not want to move away from my current page.Please fix your links.Thanks[/citation]

and to make things even worse, the new page will show you the picture with the same thumbnail size and you have to click on it again to see the full image size, brilliant!

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Apologies to all. There are things I can control in the presentation of an article and things that I cannot, but everyone here has given fair criticism. I agree that right click and opening to a new window is an important feature for articles on image quality. I'll make sure Chris continues to push the subject with the right people.

Web dev is a separate department, so we have no ability to influence the speed at which a feature is implemented. In the meantime, I've uploaded all the pictures to ZumoDrive. It's packed as a single download. http://www.zumodrive.com/share/anjfN2YwMW

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Please give us an update in a few months to see if there has been any noticeable improvements ... keep your base files for reference.

I would imagine Quicksynch is now a major plus for those interested in rendering ... and AMD and NVidia have some work to do.

I appreciate the time and effort you put into the research and the depth of the article.

Thanks,

Will do, but I think overall this article sums up everything in a way that it's relavant for months to come. (Well, it's my hope it did anyways). "In a worst-case scenario, hardware acceleration gives you 75% of the quality and a minor speed up versus processor-only transcoding. In a best-case scenario, you are getting 99% of the quality, and running up to 400% faster than a processor working on its own." The difference is that in a few months, the worse case will likely be up to 80%, 90%, or even 99%.

There is always going to be some sort of trade off, and for the majority of us, 99% quality preservation at 4x the speed is well worth the benefit. The problem is that there is virtually no way to compare transcoding software or even GPGPU hardware (or software) without introducing new variables to testing. You need to accept all the variables and treat the problem like a puzzle grid.

I would add there is so much more to image quality than what we talked about. We didn't even discuss LCD hardware or colorspace. I think this article changes the game a bit. I think we have gotten so use to seeing tearing, blocking, or some video artifact and then we simply blame the video encoder without a second thought.

If you read many of the sandy bridge articles on the web, people were simply saying "that video looks fuzzy" in very specific cases and then labeled Quick Sync or CUDA poor at transcoding as a result. While the video they saw was fuzzy, that doesn't automatically make it a transcoding error. It could have been a renderer or decoder problem. For example, if bitrate dropped off suddenly, its possible that a specific decoder wasn't cable of keeping up. This was a major point we were trying to make. Those automatic claims are invalid if they didn't cross check the problem to isolate decoders and renderers.

Hell, you can't even rely on the same trancode path. If you rerun a trancode, the randomness (due to parallelism) can cause an visible error you didn't see in the first transcode, even if you use the same hardware and software config

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Hi Toms,
Before you write this article I had never hear about all of 3 softwares you talking about.
I figure out you talk about new software supporting iPhone.

New softwares... who they're probably no optimized for all solution.
So I just imagine you didn't thinked about this before write this article.

Comeback with x264 and MediaConcept H.264 analyst and benchmark. Perhaps I'll read you this time.

When it comes to GPGPU transcoding, these are the three software titles that are at the forefront. MediaConcept only recently finished a CUDA encoder in August. Elemental coded its own back in 2008. They were the first and they are just as valid as MediaConcept. If you follow insider industry news (like streamingmedia.com - read by people that create video for the masses like Hulu's Eric Feng), then you know that Elemental's software is used by ABC, Big Ten Network, CBS Interactive, National Geographic and PBS. Hell MainConcept's Quick Sync encoder is still in beta as of this month. http://www.mainconcept.com/press/single-view/article/updated-mainconceptTM-h264avc-encoder-sdk-for-intelR-quick-sync-video.html Arcsoft and Cyberlink were Intel's launch partners to demo Quick Sync, read any of the Sandy reviews.

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Thanks for the work put into the article, since I'm very new to all this however, I think it may have gone over my head

I am in the market for a new 'budget pc' and leaning toward an intel i5-2500k with an nVidia gts450 gfx card, the system should be aimed at producing great video quality at reasonable speed.

I'm not sure if I interpretted the results correctly, but it seems I would not need to get the nvidia card after all since software encoding produces better results and the HD 3000 would suffice? any advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Thanks for the work put into the article, since I'm very new to all this however, I think it may have gone over my head

I am in the market for a new 'budget pc' and leaning toward an intel i5-2500k with an nVidia gts450 gfx card, the system should be aimed at producing great video quality at reasonable speed.

I'm not sure if I interpretted the results correctly, but it seems I would not need to get the nvidia card after all since software encoding produces better results and the HD 3000 would suffice? any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Quick Sync is basically = GPGPU. It's just done fixed function style. I would say if you aren't a crazy cook about image q, and I mean at the extreme end.... Using Spectracal to calibrate your HDTV. Only watch tv-reruns on Blu-ray, etc... Don't worry about software encoding. If are willing to give up that 1% (best case scenario) or ~25% (worse case), Quick Sync on the new Sandies will gives you up to a 4x speed bump. Remember that we used a GTX 580. It has 512 CUDA cores. The 450 only has 192. If you bought that graphics card, you wouldn't see the same transcoding performance as we did with the 580. Plus transcoding using a CUDA or APP uses the GPU for processing. That is going to burn into your power bill. Quick Sync uses fixed function hardware so its always going to be the most power efficient, even more than a pure software route.

As I see it, forget the Nvidia card (unless you are gaming). The i5-2500k will still give you two options: Quick Sync or full software encoding. Remember that you need software that actually uses Quick Sync to transcode though. It isn't an automatic feature with every transcode software.

Good luck on your build. I'd ping Don (who does our best CPU and graphics for the $ guides) if you have more questions on specific components.

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Andrew, did there are any avantage using Intel 3000 with ATI or Intel 3000 with Nvidia chipset as GPGPU ?
I don't think "drivers" currently support that kind of thing... or any encode softwares?

What did you think?

Thank you

You can only choose one encoder. It is only going to be one of the following Quick Sync, APP, or CUDA. You can't do combos. Remember that Intel HD 3000 is the graphics side. Quick Sync is a separate logic circuit even though it's on the same die. I'll add that Quick Sync is disabled if you use a discrete graphics card.

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Good article Andrew, was a nice read ... On the web thing the images are not the only problem , youtube links on Tom's don't have the fullscreen button so when I want to watch one fullscreen I have to click twice moving to youtube's page and they both start ... Annoying

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Good article Andrew, was a nice read ... On the web thing the images are not the only problem , youtube links on Tom's don't have the fullscreen button so when I want to watch one fullscreen I have to click twice moving to youtube's page and they both start ... Annoying

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